Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics by Sarah Shortall (review)
2023; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cat.2023.a907476
ISSN1534-0708
Autores Tópico(s)French Historical and Cultural Studies
ResumoReviewed by: Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics by Sarah Shortall James P. McCartin Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics. By Sarah Shortall. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2021. Pp. 352. $49.95. ISBN: 9780674980105.) Sarah Shortall's outstanding book argues that "the separation of Church and state had a productive rather than a destructive effect on Catholic theology, inspiring new approaches to the problem of political theology and opening up new avenues for Catholic engagement in public life" (p. 2). Her main protagonists—the Dominican friars Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar and the Jesuit fathers Henri de Lubac, Gaston Fessard, Yves de Montcheuil, and Pierre Chaillet—shared a desire to make theology speak compellingly to temporal real-ties. At times, they disagreed about what constituted the way forward in this project, sometimes strongly and often based on a tension between Dominican and Jesuit approaches. Still, Shortall shows, they ultimately enabled the musty old discipline of theology to count for something in the modern secular public square, in France and well beyond it. In doing so, these theologians would exercise an outsized influence. As her argument suggests, the twentieth-century renewal in Catholic theology that these men helped to birth was rooted in an irony: anticlerical laws closed down French Catholic seminaries, which sent Shortall's young protagonists into sheltered enclaves on the British island of Jersey and in rural Belgium where they reflected on the political situation of France from a remove. Shortall explores how, dreaming of home, they searched for creative ways of speaking about the challenges of everyday life without appearing to be political. Another irony, this one more well known: They helped to make theology speak a contemporary language substantially by engaging in historical research and by "returning to the sources" of ancient theologians whose vision had been long since eclipsed. By the 1930s and 1940s, as fascism overtook Western Europe, it became clear that this work prepared them to nurture a subtle "spiritual resistance," honing a language and approach that would allow them to speak to the political situation while evading censorship and sharpening a Catholic political position that was both anti-fascist and anti-liberal—at once opposed to the dynamic of the nationalist state/totalitarian collectivism and that of the capitalist system/liberal individualism. Shortall shrewdly illuminates a paradox at the heart of their theological contribution: that it was by "remaining detached from politics proper and bearing witness to its eternal mission that the Church could engage most effectively in temporal affairs" (p. 107). In time, this insight would be wide-ranging in its influence, finding fresh articulations in the theological-political vision of the Second Vatican Council and in the later work of liberation theologians, led by Gustavo Guttierrez, and the Radical Orthodoxy movement, led by John Milbank. In the light of a recent upsurge of contemporary interest in Catholic integralism and in the confessional state (see legal scholars Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeuel) against which these nouveaux theologians positioned themselves a century ago, the story of these men is particularly worthy of revisiting now. [End Page 620] Shortall's accomplishment in telling this important story, so carefully considered and so deeply grounded in the archives, is simply remarkable. James P. McCartin Fordham University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press
Referência(s)